Mission Full Publisher SEO Audit and News Eligibility Checkl

Mission brief

Select a publisher site (your own or a sample/staging site) and run a full RankAudit crawl covering Core Web Vitals per article template, news sitemap health, and NewsArticle schema validation across a sample of recent articles. Alongside the technical crawl, manually review five recent articles against the E-E-A-T checklist from this track: named byline with author page, visible dates, sourcing to primary references, and a findable corrections/editorial policy.

Check Discover readiness specifically: confirm max-image-preview:large is present sitewide, spot-check lead image sizes against the 1200px guidance, and pull the Search Console Discover and News reports (if available) to see current baseline performance before making changes.

Completing the checklist and sign-off

Compile every finding into a single eligibility checklist covering technical health, schema completeness, E-E-A-T signals and Discover readiness, marking each item pass/fail with the specific fix required for anything failing. Prioritise fixes using the same logic as the rest of this track: crawlability and indexation issues first, since nothing else matters if articles aren't indexed promptly, then schema and technical page experience, then E-E-A-T and editorial trust signals, which take longer to build but compound over time.

Re-run the RankAudit crawl after implementing fixes to confirm resolution, and set up the recurring monitoring cadence from the previous lesson so this audit becomes a repeatable process rather than a one-off exercise.

• Crawl Core Web Vitals, news sitemap health and schema across templates
• Manually review five articles against the full E-E-A-T checklist
• Confirm Discover readiness: image sizes and preview directive sitewide
• Prioritise fixes: crawlability first, then schema/speed, then E-E-A-T
• Re-crawl to confirm fixes and set a recurring monitoring cadence

Key takeaways

• ✓Combine technical crawling with manual E-E-A-T review for a full picture
• ✓Check Discover-specific readiness as its own checklist item
• ✓Prioritise fixes by what blocks indexation and eligibility first
• ✓Turn the one-off audit into a recurring monitoring habit

Why this lesson matters

This lesson belongs to Applied mission, the part of News & Publisher SEO where the goal is: run a complete publisher seo audit and confirm news eligibility end to end on a real or sample site.

Read it once, then do it straight away on a real site inside RankAudit. Nothing here is theory for its own sake — every step produces something you can show a client.

Do it now

1. 1Open RankAudit with sample data already loaded, so you are not stuck on setup.
2. 2Crawl a site and triage the issue list.
3. 3Complete the mission by running a full RankAudit sweep against the news eligibility checklist and resolving every flagged issue before sign-off.